‘What’s that?’
Alan’s fear had vanished to be replaced with something that almost sounded like disappointment. A metallic box, no larger than a suitcase, was caged in aluminium tubes and attached to what looked like an oxygen cylinder. The whole device fitted easily into the trunk of the sedan.
‘Lift it out.’
Alan reached in, somewhat emboldened by the fact that whatever it was, it wasn’t a bomb. He hefted it out of the trunk and set it down on the ground before looking up at Mary.
‘Now what?’
‘Now, you carry it up there for me,’ Mary replied.
She gestured with a nod of her head up to the top of the tower. Alan swallowed thickly and his fear returned.
‘I don’t like heights.’
‘Do you like being shot?’
The horizon was awash with a pink glow as Huck Seavers drove off the main road and into the large open lot that served Crescent Dunes. He could see the main service building ahead of him, immaculate and white amid smaller out buildings and parked lorries.
His eyes ached from the long drive, his head fuzzy with weariness and worry for his wife and children as he pulled into a parking slot and killed the engine, wondering just what the hell he was going to do next. A local radio station had reported explosions at a major power station outside Las Vegas, half of the strip going dark, the presence of FBI agents at the scene and chaos as engineers struggled to restore the power.
The desert was silent as he got out of the car and began walking across the lot, and for a moment he felt as though he were in one of those post — apocalyptic movies, a last survivor of some global pandemic wandering a lonely planet. The stillness of the air and the silence did little to comfort him as he strode across toward the service building and peered into a window.
The interior was dark, the reception area devoid of personnel, to be expected at this early hour he supposed. He glanced left and right and then he saw it. A single door, the locks bust off, perhaps using a crowbar or similar. The door was ajar, a blackness inside that Huck did not want to confront. He spared a thought for his family, for Stanley Meyer, and then he took a breath and walked across to the door and swung it open.
Silence and darkness greeted him, but at the end of the hall he could see an open doorway from which spilled light. Emboldened, Huck walked down the corridor, trying to keep his footfalls as silent as possible as he approached the open door. Beyond, he could see flashing lights that looked like some kind of control room and then he heard the low, muffled moaning.
Huck stopped, listening intently and acutely aware that he was stranded half — way down the corridor with nowhere to hide. He watched and waited, listening to the low moaning and once again reminded of those horrible zombie movies, but then he pushed forward to the doorway and peered inside.
He saw the men tied up on the floor and immediately he hurried across to one of them and leaned down. The man was gagged, his wrists tied behind his back and bound to his ankles. Huck reached down and pulled off the gag.
‘Call the police!’ the man coughed as he gasped for air. ‘She’s insane and she’s got a hostage!’
‘Who? What did she look like?’
‘Who the hell cares?! Call the police!’
Huck looked up at the control panels. Mary must have come through here and picked up a hostage for some reason, perhaps protection against Majestic Twelve should they manage to locate her in time, although it seemed MJ–12 cared little for collateral damage. She must have travelled to the tower, but he could not fathom what she intended to do.
‘She reprogrammed the panels,’ the scientist said in dismay. ‘They’re deactivated. You need to call the police and inform them of what’s happened before … ’
Huck replaced the man’s gag to a groan of protest as he stood up. The moment the police were called, Majestic Twelve would send people and Mary would be killed, if they weren’t on their way already. Huck knew that his best bet was to reach out to her himself, to do something, anything, to join forces with her and bring the fusion cage to the world.
Huck ran out of the service building, turned and sprinted into the massive mirror array as he headed toward the tower. Maybe, just maybe, he could get Mary out of here before it was too late.
She recognized the arrogant stride as soon as she saw it.
Huck Seavers walked from his car to the service building, and emerged a few minutes later at a run, headed toward the tower. He looked strange in the low light, disembodied, seen through a tunnel of darkness as a shadowy figure flashing past one solar mirror stand after another as he ran the five hundred metres from the service building to the tower’s base.
Amber Ryan lay prone in a low depression alongside a heliostat, her position perfectly masked by the mirror itself. The rifle in her grasp was perfect for the job and it felt natural in her grasp, the telescopic optics perfectly aligned after she had “zeroed” them to her eyesight further out in the desert. The winds were light, the bullet drop at two hundred fifty yards already calibrated on the scope and range — finder.
Amber could hit a small bird at this range, even in a breeze.
Cover me, Mary had begged. Just until this is over, so that they can’t do to us what they did to Stanley.
Mary had been in tears, shivering, shaking and her eyes both wide with fear and yet hard with determination. For Stanley.
The crosshairs tracked Huck as he moved but at a sprint and at such range and with the solar array supports forming a forest before her, Amber knew that a wild shot would be unlikely to finds its target and would only serve to alert Huck Seavers to Amber’s presence. Besides, that was not what Mary wanted. Her instructions had been clear: she wanted no innocent people involved and Amber was just to be a back — up. If somebody tried to kill Mary, then she should act accordingly before fleeing the scene.
Huck was on his way to prevent Mary from revealing something amazing and wonderful to the world.
Huck had killed Stanley Meyer.
Amber kept him in her sights as he entered the tower, and prepared to pick him up again when he emerged at the top.
XLI
‘Put it there.’
Alan set the fusion cage down on the floor alongside a set of steel doors, access panels that opened out onto a walkway that encircled the tower just below the salt chamber at the top.
The tower’s base possessed only a narrow entrance, used to bring in the vast lengths of steel pipe used to transport the salts up and down the tower. The heat inside was intense, Mary’s shirt soaked through and Alan’s hair matted flat against his head, his beard glistening with sweat and his face sheened.
Mary could feel the even more intense heat generated by the chamber above them permeating the air and the walls as she positioned the fusion cage beneath the chamber and looked up to the ceiling. When the solar array was active, it directed the light from the mirrors to the heating chamber where they now stood and at the salt tower above them, heating those salts to more than a thousand degrees centigrade.
Alan stepped back from the fusion cage, staring at it as though confused.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘It’s not a bomb, there’s no timer.’
‘Be quiet.’
Mary turned to the steel doors. From her pocket she pulled a small set of folding bolt croppers and handed them to Alan.
‘Break the lock,’ she ordered.
‘I don’t know if I can,’ Alan whimpered, the fear returning once more as he looked at the padlock holding the door latch in place.